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Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is an amalgamation of the Six Sigma operational performance improvement methodology and the Lean methods used to eliminate non-value added steps (waste) in the business process.  
The term Sigma is used to define the spread around a mean (average) value. In the process world this can be used to measure the performance of a process.  The higher the sigma level the better a process is performing and the less chance of a process producing defects.  Generally as the sigma level increases, the number of defects goes down, cycle time decreases and customer satisfaction goes up.
Six Sigma started in the 1980s beginning at Motorola and was quickly adopted by a number of companies including General Electric and AlliedSignal.  It incorporated elements of Total Quality Management as well as Statistical Process Control and expanded from a manufacturing base to other industries and processes.  It has a focus on quality and the reduction of variability.

                       

    

Lean developed from the concepts comprising the Toyota Production System or Lean Manufacturing, often referred to just as Lean.  That is the elimination of all types of ‘waste’ including excess inventory and increased process speed.  It established a focus on the customer definition of value and used that to determine the proper process timing and flow.
In the late 1990s some American companies designed programs which took elements from both Lean and Six Sigma.  They cross-trained employees in both methodologies, creating project frameworks that combined the two techniques.  This was because:
• Lean cannot bring a process under statistical control
• Six sigma alone cannot improve process ‘velocity’
• But both enable the reduction of the cost of complexity
So Lean Six Sigma is a unification of applicable techniques and tools from both Lean and Six Sigma to reduce variation and waste using a structured method to solve problems.

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